Qualla: Arthur Dobbs

Arthur Dobbs: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jon Sullivan, Public domain. In January 1760, Arthur Dobbs sat in Brunswick, North Carolina, and wrote a letter to the botanist Peter Collinson in London. He described a plant unlike anything English science had on file: a leaf with hinged jaws that snapped shut on whatever touched it. The natives, he wrote, knew it grew in latitude 34 but not in 35. He had been collecting seeds. The letter was the first scientific description of what would soon be named the Venus flytrap. Dobbs was sixty when he wrote it, near the end of a life that had already taken him from Ayrshire to Antrim to Dublin to the Northwest Passage debate, and finally to a colonial governorship he would not survive.

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Image: Jon Sullivan | Public domain

Arthur Dobbs: Born in Ayrshire, Raised in Antrim

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Dobbs was born on April 2, 1689, in Girvan, Ayrshire, where his mother had been sent for safety during political and religious unrest in Ireland. His family seat was Castle Dobbs in County Antrim, built in 1599 by his great-great-grandfather John Dobbs, an officer who had arrived...

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Arthur Dobbs: The Surveyor and the MP

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Sir Robert Walpole appointed Dobbs Engineer-in-Chief and Surveyor-General of Ireland. In that role, he supervised the construction of the Irish Parliament House in Dublin, the world's first purpose-built bicameral parliament building and now the Bank of Ireland on College Green. ...

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Arthur Dobbs: Hunting the Northwest Passage

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Dobbs spent the 1740s arguing with the Hudson's Bay Company. He believed the company was sitting on its trade monopoly and ignoring the search for a Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic. From 1741 to 1747, he personally stimulated and funded exploration expeditions, hopi...

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Arthur Dobbs: Governor of North Carolina

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. While serving in the Irish Parliament, Dobbs bought 400,000 acres in North Carolina in 1745 and pushed for Scots-Irish settlement of the colony. When Governor Gabriel Johnston died, Dobbs was confirmed as his successor on January 25, 1753. He did not arrive in North Carolina to t...

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Arthur Dobbs: Catch Fly Sensitive

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Scan by NYPL, Public domain. Dobbs's lasting scientific contribution came from the wet, longleaf pine country around the lower Cape Fear. In 1759 he made the first written notice of the plant, calling it a Catch Fly Sensitive. The following January, in Brunswick, he wrote the more detailed letter to Peter Co...

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Image: Scan by NYPL | Public domain